Flexible working & family friendly

Our employment lawyers work with employers to help them retain talented staff who wish to balance and integrate their working and family lives advising employers on family friendly rights at work including shared parental leave, maternity leave, and adoption leave.

Where a mutually satisfactory compromise cannot be reached, we help employers to protect their business interests and justify their decisions objectively in a non-discriminatory manner. Where necessary we help employers to defend robustly discrimination claims in relation to family friendly issues such as return from maternity leave and flexible working requests.

Such claims need to be carefully handled because of their potential to adversely affect staff morale and the professional reputation of the business and senior management, as well as the risk of unlimited compensation awards.

Every employee with at least 26 weeks continuous service has the right to make a flexible working request. Only one request can be made in a 12-month period and an employer must deal with the request reasonably and can only reject it on the basis of eight prescribed business reasons. Our team can advise on how to handle such requests and avoid discrimination claims.